New Bus in Pictures

The other day we told my grandparents about the new bus. My grandma inquired “oh, and does it run well?”, to which my mom chortled and responded “they basically bought a chassis”. Okay, so my mom was more or less right.

By popular request, I present to you, in its blogosphere debut—our new chassis.

 

The new wiring harness is schedule to arrive today. We should have some hopefully not too exciting reports to deliver next week on our wiring adventures.

Oh, and for the record--we aren't missing the other three cargo doors--they just don't happen to be attached to the bus at present.

Out With the Old, In With the Older.

My father-in-law has grown tired of hearing about VWs on this blog, so today I’m going to start with a different genre of story. :-)

One semester when I was in college, I thought I would major in Statistics. I love numbers and data and thought this would be a perfect field for me. I called my mom (who is a math professor) to report to her my newest choice of path (I went through a lot). Her response to my announcement was: “Statisticians are the whores of mathematics”. Oh…thanks Mom. Her point was that Statisticians sell their skills while REAL mathematicians are poor hermits who go loony and forget to shower and wander the streets in search of answers to numerical quandaries. Something like that anyway. (Back to VWs.)

My real point in telling you this story is that sometimes I worry that readers of this blog will think that Craig and I are the whores of the VW world because we go through so many vehicles. The truth is, that we love to see VWs on the road and we always spend more money on our VWs than we make in selling them. We may be a little anti-frugal at times with our VWs, and we may be a little too passionate about keeping these beasts out of the crushers, but we don’t think we are whores. Hopefully you agree. Also, we have really short attention spans.

You see where I’m going with this, right?

A couple of weeks ago, we started talking about selling BB. Long story short, we listed her just to test the waters and three days later she was gone. Sigh. We’ve got some mixed feelings over here. We’re really disappointed with our timing as we were EXCITED for the Maupin campout in Mid June which now we aren’t going to be able to attend. We’re going to have to wallow in self pity and do some retail therapy buying parts for our new….

’58 double door panel bus! We didn’t think we’d buy another project anytime soon, but one thing led to another and, well, we did. We’re not positive what this baby is going to look like when we’re done (will it be a camper? A 15 window?) but we’re really excited and we should have some serious project blog posts coming up soon. We’re so excited!

In the mean time—does anyone have any friends who would like to buy this beautiful ’65 11 window standard? We love her but kinda need the funds to get the ’58 on the road.

Thanks for reading and for all of your support!

May Day

Last weekend our club held a swap meet and show and shine. The swap meet was a smash hit and with the exception of the periodic cloud cover and wind, we had a great time at the show and shine too. Oh, and by the way—if you are ever trying to get to Lakeview Park in Nampa, Idaho, don’t Google it. If you do, you’ll wind up in a cul-de-sac in South Nampa and will be late arriving to the real Lakeview Park. Not that I would know from experience or anything.

I didn't much feel like breaking out the ol' camera, so I (again) borrowed pictures from my fellow VW drivers. The photos on the grass were taken by Dustin Wark whose photography skills I greatly admire and who was nice enough to humor me by photographing my dirty bus...who you may notice has a new addition--safari windows!!

Day 4: Kelley Park VW Show

Kelley Park is a really cool venue for a VW show. I don’t know much about its history but here’s what historysanjose.org has to say about it. “With 27 original and reproduction homes, businesses and landmarks History Park [in Kelley Park] highlights Santa Clara Valley's past. Complete with paved streets, running trolleys and a cafe, this 14-acre site has the charm and ambiance of times gone by.” I would add—is especially spectacular when lined with beautifully restored Volkswagens. For me, it just doesn’t get better than history, Volkswagens, and sunshine (well, my husband too, but I don’t want to get all sappy on ya) all together.


I think this is going to be best described in pictures. Here it is: Kelley Park 2010. (oh, and thanks to my friends for letting me steal about half of these pictures…I don’t usually worry about photo disclaimers on this site but if you are going to use any of these pictures for monetary gain or something like that, then um…ask me first or something like that. Whatever you’re supposed to say.)

After the show ended, we headed home. Again, it was a long drive, but so much fun.

Red Barn: Days 2 and 3

Friday night, we headed to the Red Barn campout and swap meet. On the way there, we (sadly) spotted our club President’s 21 window bus pulled over on the shoulder of the freeway. This is the 2nd time our President has attempted to take this bus to an out of state show and the 2nd time the bus has broken down before arriving…actually barely after embarking. Sad, yes.

The property where Red Barn takes place is a flea market parking lot which annually fills up with VWs, their owners, their dogs, and swap stuff. This was a seriously old school group. The 1970 bay window that was with us was probably the newest ACVW at the campout. The swap meet was fun and of a pretty decent size. We picked up two hubcaps at $5 each as we had lost two.

Upon leaving Red Barn, our group headed over to Santa Cruz where we walked around for what seemed like hours trying to agree on a satisfactory restaurant for lunch. Eventually the 14 of us got hungry and cranky and ended up at three separate restaurants. (Everyone made up after eating.)

California is beautiful this time of year.

Up next: Kelley Park

Kelley Park trip: days 1 and 2

We started out bright and early last Thursday morning for our trip to Kelley Park. We were three ACVWs and some other car (I believe it was a Mitsubishi Montero).

Our destination for Thursday night was Sacramento. I’ve made this drive several times in my life but I have to tell you, it is a LONG drive from here in a VW bus. Having said that, it was, of course, a relaxing and wonderfully fun drive.

Friday, morning we spent some time in “Old Sac”. I wish I would have known a little more about its history before visiting, but it was excellent nonetheless. Old Sac is pretty much what you’d guess it is—the buildings and area of town where the modern city of Sacramento began. The buildings date to the mid 1800s and now contain entertaining little candy shops, gift shops, hat shops, and the like. Our favorite was Evangeline’s—an awesome novelty gift shop where we all spent a little cash and time.

Once the money in our parking meters had run out, we headed down to Mark Merrill’s shop party. On the way, a couple of things happened. First, I was navigating in my atlas as I regularly do and could see the shadow of our antenna which I could tell had something on the top of it—unusual. I finally looked out the window…you can see the reflection on this photo.

I’m not going to tell you what it is--or what I yelled into my radio at my friends in the other cars. If you were at Kelley Park, you may have noticed this object on all of the Idaho VWs. So classy.

The second memorable event on the way to Mark Merrill's was as follows. A semi passed our caravan (which happened a lot) and as it did so, it ripped a cooler and small grill off of the top of the luggage rack of the white Westy that was with us and came bouncing down the freeway at our bus. Fortunately, the cooler made its way off of the road just in time and the grill causes minimal damage to our bus' nose. Whew. It was scary. Note to self. Keep only low profile objects in the luggage rack of our Westy.

Back to the shop party. Astonishing. Breathtaking. Indescribable. Sacred. Mark has an amazingly incredible shop/museum where he houses some rare and perfectly restored VWs. I'll let the pictures talk.

Also in attendance was a double cab that was once owned and operated by the California Highway Patrol. Suposedly black is its original color. Sweet, eh?

…and here’s my first look at a Hebmuller. Ooooooo, it was so fantastically beautiful.

Mark also had a room filled to the brim with VW toys, a library full of more VW literature than I’ve ever seen, and a hallway lined with VW ads. Words can’t do this place justice. Seriously, it was astonishing and completely worth the 15 hours of driving it took us to get there.

Up tomorrow: Red Barn.